I also want to find time to respond to my friend Matt, who commented and asked me about challenges 58 and 59, related to finding plait presentations for 11-crossing knots. I imagine that the around 99% of people who read this will say, "What's a plait presentation?" Don't worry, it is nothing magical or incredibly difficult to get your head around, and I will say something about that soon I hope.

Less than a week in and I'm already making excuses as to why I'm not writing! It's a busy time, with family stuff, job applications I'm filling in and so on. I am still committed to seeing this through though; thanks to all who have commented so far, I hope I make it an interesting read as I get on with these things. By the end of the week I will have tweaked the template a little further, and will add a link at the side to the entry with the list in, and will edit that as and when I complete things, OK?

One change to the list though: I decided that 1001 haiku really was far too many, and so have scaled that back to 101.

3 comments:

I've not been playing to get better for all that long, so the tips I have aren't up to much...

Shuffle your tiles around - without a doubt, this is key to getting your brain thinking about anagrams and stringing longer words together. I don't remember where I've seen it, but I am sure that I read somewhere that there is a connection between shuffling your tiles and getting better words.

As regards play, higher scores are all about making connections; the higher scores I've got have been when I've played a word that has intersected in several places with other words, even if only to create a few two letter words.

For an example from a recent game, I had the word NOBBLE on the board, and placed the word AIM as follows:

NOBBLE AIM

Doesn't seem like much, but all of a sudden you have points from four words and not just one coming in!

Also, if you have an S look for words that you can pluralise by putting the S at the end and forming a bigger word with it :)